Dan and Phil, Best Friends?
by J4m0nT045t
Summary: A phanfic about what it could be like if Dan and Phil had a fight that ended their friendship
1. Chapter 1

Dan and Phil, Best Friends

As Dan sits on the kitchen floor, staring blankly at the fridge, his videos are not being made, his emails are not being answered, his Tumblr is not even being updated. Nothing is getting done, but what does it matter? It's all pointless. He has been sitting here for two and a half days now, completely immoblised. He has not eaten, he has not drunk, he has not even gone to the toilet. The past two and a half days have consisted entirely of Dan sitting on the kitchen floor, staring at the fridge, hoping to find the meaning of life in its distorted, silver reflections. He thinks he has slept but he isn't sure, he just drifts in and out of consciousness so subtly that when he awakes, he can't quite be certain he was ever asleep.

Six hours later, nothing has changed. It has now been three days since Dan collapsed onto the kitchen floor, no longer able to muster the energy to stand, or even to care. Three days since Dan's world collapsed around him. Three days earlier

Phil just can't take it anymore! He screams at the top of his lungs and punches the wall, expecting his fist to break straight through the plaster. Instead, he scrapes his knuckles, infuriating him further. He pulls his fist back for another swing, this time aiming for a photograph when an he feels a hand grab his elbow.  
'Stop!' shouts Dan, 'This isn't he-'  
Phil spits in Dan's face and storms off, leaving a trail of broken photographs and kicked over houseplants in his wake.  
'Please,' Dan says, tears streaming down his face, 'please let's just talk about this. We can work it out'  
'I'm done talking. I've had enough of you and your possessive, demanding bullshit and I can't do this anymore!'  
Phil starts shoving stuff into a suitcase; clothes, his secret money stash, his stuffed lion when the realization of what he is doing finally hits him. He's leaving Dan. He's doing the one thing he swore he'd never do, the one thing that will break Dan forever.  
'No,' he thinks to himself, 'I can't let him control me any longer. I need to get out of here.'  
Phil storms out of his room and through the kitchen, past a distraught Dan and straight out the front door of the apartment they shared until just moments ago because deep in his heart, Phil knows he can never return. It's too late for that now.

Dan collapses to the kitchen floor in shock, salty waterfalls of pain gushing down his face. In his head he's chasing after Phil, they're talking and they work things out. Phil returns and they never speak of this terrible day again. Dan doesn't even realise he's imagining this, that it's all in his head, for quite some time.

Present day

A knock on the door startles Dan awake, for once aware that he had dozed off. He tries to stand but fails, instead crawling to the door to unlock it. As the door swings open Dan realizes its him, he's back! Phil has returned to make things right! Dan looks up at Phil's face, slowly distorting into an angry scowl. Dan tries to speak but no words come out. Suddenly, Phil's skin becomes pale and lifeless and he lifts off the ground, a bloodied noose around his neck.  
His soulless eyes stare at Dan and his mouth moves silently, 'This is all your fault Dan,' he seems to say, over and over and over again.

Dan awakes on the kitchen floor, terrified and crying from the first of many nightmares that will plague Dan for many years to come. Dan is desperate to escape the emptiness that has consumed him for the past three days. He leans over and grabs a piece of glass from one of the broken photo frames and braces himself, not certain how bad the pain will be. Dan presses the shard of glass into his left forearm and pulls it across, gasping in pain as the crimson liquid oozes up and out of the cut. He positions the glass to cut again but hesitates, remembering the pain from just moments before, unsure if he can do it again. Then he remembers where the glass came from, the pain of his fight with Phil and Phil walking out and he has three more cuts on his arm before he even notices, each one deeper and bleeding more heavily than the last. He cuts once more and realises he no longer feels the emptiness that gripped him not long ago, nor the pain and heartbreak of his best friend leaving him. Other than the pain in his arm he feels… normal.

Dan stands and walks to the sink, cleaning his cuts under the tap before heading to bed to spend his first real night alone in the apartment.


	2. Chapter 2

Dan and Phil, Best Friends Part 2

Phil awakes in the hotel room he has been staying in, blinking from the sunlight and wiping sleep from his eyes. It is mid afternoon and he has only just awoken from his third night away from their apartment. He always sleeps in until the afternoon now, eating breakfast without Dan and their daily anime is just too painful. He stumbles to the fridge, his head throbbing and his throat parched. A wave of dizziness overcomes him and he has to stop and use the fridge to support himself for a moment.  
'To Hell with it,' he thinks, grabbing a beer and drinking several large gulps immediately. He returns to bed and mindlessly stares at the TV, not taking anything in. He checks his phone, hoping to have heard from Dan but no. There are 12 missed calls from Louise, only four of them from today. Once Phil is suitable drunk that he can no longer feel the pain, he goes to the nearest shop. He buys a box of Dan's favourite cereal, some milk, a lighter and his first pack of cigarettes.

At the hotel, Phil makes himself a bowl of cereal and steps onto the balcony for his first cigarette. He lights the cigarette and puts it between his teeth, screwing his nose up at the awful smell.  
'I think you're supposed to breathe it in,' he says to himself before inhaling deeply. The foul smoke fills his lungs, causing him to cough and splutter. His mouth is filled with the acrid taste of tobacco smoke and his lungs are on fire, as if he's just run a marathon.  
'Why do people do this?' He thinks while raising the cigarette to his lips again, bracing himself for another coughing fit. He breathes a little shallower this time and he doesn't cough, he's even tarting to enjoy it now. By the time he has finished his cigarette, he no longer feels upset about the events of that night at their apartment or him walking out on Dan.

Before he knows it, Phil has eaten the whole box of cereal, smoked half the pack of cigarettes, finished a dozen beers and it is 3 AM. He stumbles to bed and passes out, too tired and drunk to care that he is still fully clothed, or that his balcony door is wide open.

Dan does not awake for 36 hours after he goes to sleep that night. He forces himself out of bed, only to find himself crying in Phil's room just moments later.  
'I can't do this,' he thinks, 'I can't live without him.' Remembering the relief he felt from the piece of glass on the kitchen floor the other night, Dan gets a small knife from the kitchen and begins to brutally carve away at his arm. The pain envelops him and removes all emotional distress, removes the need to feel anything at all. There is so much blood but Dan doesn't care. He doesn't care when it runs down his arm, nor when it drips onto his jeans, or even when it collects on Phil's pillow. He doesn't need to care anymore, the pain makes sure of that.  
'I don't need to ever feel again,' He thinks.

When Dan decides he's cut himself enough, he drops the bloodied knife on the floor and curls up on Phil's bed, hugging the pillow that is not covered in blood. It is there he stays, staring at the stickers on Phil's dresser for hours. During this time, he hears a knock on the door but doesn't care enough to answer.

For the next week, nothing changes for Dan and Phil. Phil remains in a state of perpetual drunkenness, eating foods that remind him of Dan, ignoring phone calls from Louise and smoking constantly. Dan sits in Phil's room all day and cuts his arm to avoid feeling any emotional pain. No videos are recorded, edited or posted, no tweets tweeted or Tumblr posts posted. They both miss their BBC Radio show and neither of them dares to contact the other. Dan and Phil is over.


	3. Chapter 3

Dan and Phil, Best Friends Part 3

One week and three days after their fight, Phil returns to the apartment. He needs more weather-appropriate clothing than what he hurriedly packed, and he's hoping that upon seeing him, Dan will apologise and beg him to stay. Phil's heart races and his stomach forces itself up and into the back of his throat as he approaches the front door of the apartment. He unlocks the door with his key and enters, noticing that Dan hasn't cleaned up at all since their fight. There is broken glass all over the floor and one of the house plants that got knocked over in Phil's rage is half-dead. He rights it and does his best to put the plant back in the pot properly before heading to the living room.

Upon seeing no sign of Dan, Phil checks Dan's room and the office but he is nowhere to be found.  
'Odd,' he thinks, 'I wonder where he could be?' Any confusion as to where Dan is dissipates immediately when Phil enters his own room. Phil's pillow and quilt are covered in so much blood. He pales and feels queasy at the sight of it before panic sets in at the realisation that it must be Dan's blood. He shuffles toward the bed, terrified of what he will see on the other side. As he peers over his blood-stained bed, Phil expects the worst. He expects to see Dan's lifeless body lying on the floor but instead, all he sees is a bloodied knife. Confused, but no longer fearing for Dan's life, Phil begins to grab what he needs.

It is with a sickening feeling while packing his clothes that Phil solves the mystery of the knife and all the blood. Phil wants to vomit when he realises what Dan has been doing to himself, the thought that anyone could do that repulses him so much that any hope of Dan returning and begging him to stay is pushed from his mind. He no longer wants anything to do with the weak, broken person who lives here. It is with this thought that Phil hurries to leave the apartment as soon as he can, leaving everything how he found it in the hopes that Dan will never know he'd been there.

Dan wakes up on the tenth morning of Phil staying elsewhere and the seventh morning he has woken in a pool of dried blood on Phil's bed. He goes to the kitchen, looking for food, only to realise he's finally run out and will have to leave the apartment. Fortunately, it is cold out and he can hide his arm from prying eyes with long sleeves without seeming suspicious, which is exactly what he does before heading out the front door, locking it behind him. Shopping is so normal, so domestic, that he can't help but think of the thousand times he'd done it with Phil and it is all he can do to hold in his tears as he breaks down in the cereal aisle.

Finally, Dan returns to the apartment building. As he walks up to the front door, Dan sees someone further down the pavement that looks so much like Phil that the tears finally force their way out. Dan begins the long and tiring journey up the stairs and, upon reaching the door to his apartment, fumbles with his keys before inserting them into the lock. He goes inside and pack the shopping away, thinking the whole time that something isn't right. He just doesn't know what.

As Dan is walking towards Phil's room, glass of cereal in hand, he realises. The door was unlocked when he came in. Someone is in the apartment. With that realisation, Dan notices a pot plant that was knocked over during Phil's rampage has been stood up. Someone has definitely been here. He looks around the apartment and finds nobody, eventually settling in Phil's room as planned, still puzzled. As he sits there, drinking his cereal and surveying the room, Dan notices that Phil's jumper drawer is ajar when he is certain it wasn't this morning.  
'Phil was here,' he says to nobody in particular, 'Phil was here getting warm clothes and I missed him,' followed by, 'Actually, I'm glad. I didn't want to see him anyway. Not after what he did.'

Dan finishes drinking his cereal and passes out on Phil's bed. The trip to the shops was exhausting in his current emotional state, as well as the thought of how close he'd come to seeing Phil, and Dan has no energy left for anything.


End file.
